Review: Armored

The delicate planning scenario (The Great Train Robbery, Rififi), the humorous spin (Small Time Crooks, Quick Change), the hidden master plan (Inside Man, The Lookout), the crew of hardened professionals (Ronin, Heat), the sexy, over-the-top robbery (Oceans 12, The Italian Job), and the aftermath (Reservoir Dogs); these are the six core orbits almost all heist films fall into. If one were to draw a Venn diagram depicting the overlap between the six circles, Nimrod Antal's Armored would land almost exclusively in the aftermath category. There's no planning involved, no comic relief, no last minute twist, no grandiose kidnapping, no inkling of men with enough skill to count how many exits there are from any room they're in.

No, Armored is a simple story of a group of blue collar workers who ferry millions in cash to and fro for an armored transport escort service and decide one day that they're going to rob themselves during a staged, fake heist, making away with the bank's insured $42 million. As with all heist films, however, things do not go as planned, and so the audience spends the bulk of the picture post-heist in the midst of the bloody consequence stage of what was supposed to be a bloodless operation.

Now to say that Armored has no extended planning sequence or no grand scheme is not to say that it is lacking such machinations, rather they were not required by the story at hand. And though this may turn off viewers who are accustomed to seeing the What, Where, When, and How thoroughly established before hand, it's not a problem for Nimrod Antal, who manages to transform a simple story into an engaging 88 minutes by spending all of his time on the Who and the Why. The trailers may have potential viewers believing Armored is going to be an explosion-packed thrill ride that follows a group of sympathetic Joe Schmoes making off like bandits, but that's not what Antal has delivered; and that is actually a good thing.